Among merchants there is, hence, very little thought of the subject of justice, and no effort to discover truth. There must, at the end of the year, be a favorable balance on the right side of the ledger, or the balance on the wrong side unerringly points the way to ruin. This is the post-school training of the merchant. That neither it nor his previous education renders him skilful we know, since he fails ninety-three to ninety-seven times in a hundred trials. That subjective training does not and never can promote rectitude has been shown in a former chapter of this work. That merchants who compromise with their creditors, and subsequently accumulate fortunes, very rarely repay the debt formerly forgiven is a notorious fact. A Chicago merchant who himself repaid such a composition debt early in his career, states, at the end of twenty-five years’ experience, that of compromises involving several hundred thousand dollars, made by him in favor of debtors, not one dollar has ever been repaid.
Upon leaving school or college the lawyer, the judge, and the legislator at once apply themselves to books; their subsequent training is exclusively subjective. Their ideas receive color from, and are verified only by reference to, consciousness. Subjective truths have no relations to things, and hence are susceptible of verification only through consciousness. They are, therefore, mere speculations after all, often ingenious but always problematical. The result of such training is selfishness—selfishness of a very intense character; and, as has been already shown, selfishness is merely another name for injustice.
On the other hand the artisan devotes himself to things. His training is exclusively objective. His ideas flow outward; he studies the nature and relations of things. In this investigation he forgets self because his life becomes a grand struggle in search of truth; and the discovery of truth in things, if not easy, is ultimately sure of attainment, since harmony is its sign, and its opposite, the false, is certain of exposure through its native deformity; for however alluring a lie may be made to appear in the abstract, in the concrete it is a monster unmasked.
From the false the artisan intuitively shrinks. He can only succeed by finding the truth, and embodying it in some useful or beautiful thing which will contribute to the comfort or pleasure of man. Hence his watchword is utility, or, beauty in utility. Of the engrossing character of this struggle the story of Bernard Palissy affords a splendid illustration. Palissy was an artist, a student, and a naturalist, but poor, and compelled to follow the profession of surveying to support his family. At the age of thirty he saw an enamelled cup, of Italian manufacture, which fired his ambition. Ignorant of the nature of clays, he nevertheless resolved to discover enamel, and entered upon a laborious course of investigation and experiment with that end in view. After many years of Herculean effort and indescribable privation, which beggared and estranged his family, and rendered him an object of ridicule among his neighbors, he achieved a grand success. At a critical period of his experiments, in the face of the indignant protests of his almost starving family, having exhausted his credit to the last penny, he consigned to the flames of his furnace the chairs, tables, and floors of his humble cottage, and continued to watch his chemicals with all-absorbing attention, while his wife in despair rushed through the streets making loud proclamation of the scandal.
But Palissy was more than a potter; he was a Christian, a philosopher, and an austere reformer. Notwithstanding he had been petted and patronized as an ingenious artisan by the royal family of France, he was finally cast into prison under charge of heresy. It was there that the remarkable interview with King Henry III. occurred, which immortalized Palissy as a hero. “My good man,” said the king, “you have been forty-five years in the service of the queen, my mother, or in mine, and we have suffered you to live in your own religion, amid all the executions and the massacres. Now, however, I am so pressed by the Guise party and my people that I have been compelled in spite of myself to imprison these two poor women and you.” “Sire,” answered the old man, “the count came yesterday on your part, promising life to these two sisters upon condition of the sacrifice of their virtue. They replied that they would now be martyrs to their own honor as well as for the honor of God. You have said several times that you feel pity for me; but it is I who pity you, who have said, ‘I am compelled!’ That is not speaking like a king. These girls and I, who have part in the kingdom of heaven—we will teach you to talk royally. The Guisarts, all your people, and yourself, cannot compel a potter to bow down to images of clay!”[63] And Palissy the potter and heretic, at the age of seventy, died in the Bastile, proudly defying a king.
[63] “Palissy the Potter,” Vol. II., pp. 187, 188. By Henry Morley. Boston: Ticknor, Reed & Fields, 1853.
The more absorbing the struggle for the discovery of truth the less room there is in the mind for selfishness; and as selfishness recedes, justice assumes its appropriate place as the controlling element in human conduct. The hero is an honest man, that’s all,—
“Though love repine, and reason chafe,
There comes a voice without reply;
’Tis man’s perdition to be safe,
When for the truth he ought to die.”
If all men were heroes—honest—there would be no occasion for heroism. If all education can be made scientific, all men can be made honest. The struggle to find truth is more natural than the struggle to succeed regardless of, or against, truth. The reason why what we call heroism appears so grand is this: the standards of public judgment have become so perverted by long custom in the abuse of truth, that normal conduct appears strange.
When Palissy burned his chairs and tables in the cause of art, his family and his neighbors derided him, and denounced him as a madman, and in prison the king urged him, as a friend, to save himself from death by recanting his assertion of the right of freedom of religious opinion. Palissy was a hero neither to his family, his friends, nor his king;[64] but he was right, and his discovery and his firmness rendered him immortal. We now know, three hundred years farther down the course of time, that Palissy’s struggle over the furnace in the cause of art was mentally and morally normal, while the opposition he encountered was abnormal; and that his defiance of the king was mentally and morally normal, while his persecution was abnormal and cruel.